What are the key trends and findings from the 2025 Content Marketing Industry Benchmark Survey?
The 2025 Content Marketing Industry Benchmark Survey reveals that nearly half of B2B marketers expect budget increases, with top priorities including AI integration, first-party data activation, and hyper-personalization. Effective strategies focus on formal AI guidelines, video content, and thought-leadership initiatives, while resource constraints remain a challenge.
The 2025 annual industry survey by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs is now open and will close on August 4, 2025. Anonymous responses from more than 1,100 global marketers collected between June and August 2024 already show that nearly half of B2B professionals expect budget increases for content marketing in 2025. This year’s questionnaire digs deeper into four core themes: AI integration, thought-leadership programs, first-party data activation, and hyper-personalization techniques.
Participants who finish the anonymous survey can enter a drawing for one of five $100 Visa gift cards. The final report, scheduled for release in October 2025, will become the benchmark that agencies, brands, and technology vendors consult when planning next-year roadmaps. No respondent names or company identifiers are collected at any stage.
Data from the 2024 edition illustrate why the new wave matters. In the earlier study, 46 percent of respondents predicted budget growth, yet only 29 percent rated their documented strategy as “extremely” or “very” effective. A striking 45 percent admitted they had no scalable content production model, and 54 percent cited resource constraints as an ongoing obstacle. Those numbers set the stage for the sharper focus on AI and analytics in the current questionnaire.
Early insights already indicate that top-performing organizations are twice as likely to have formal AI guidelines and to embed AI in both creation and optimization workflows. Enterprise marketers report that video content and thought-leadership initiatives will receive the largest share of fresh funds, while in-person events and audio content show declining investment for the second consecutive year.
For professionals looking to compare their maturity level with peers, the 2025 survey offers a rare zero-risk opportunity: no registration, no public attribution, and a chance to guide the industry’s collective understanding of readiness for the next cycle of AI-driven content strategies.
